Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

women remain massively overburdened, while men often fail to do their fair share.

many a woman unwittingly echoes and validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her labor, and to his leisure time.

When a woman internalizes her putative obligations to care for others at the expense of herself, there is affective as well as behavioral fallout. She is likely to feel guilt and shame for holding a male partner accountable—and,

A woman is entitled to more than just “help” or “support” from a male partner. And she is entitled to as much rest and leisure time as he is for her own sake, not just for the sake of becoming a better caregiver.

the kind of attitude that underlies and perpetuates mansplaining.6 And my answer, in short, is entitlement: entitlement of the epistemic variety, which relates to knowledge, beliefs, and the possession of information.

mansplaining typically stems from an unwarranted sense of entitlement on the part of the mansplainer to occupy the conversational position of the knower by default:

the philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “testimonial smothering,” where a speaker self-silences, due to her anticipating that her word will not receive the proper uptake, and may instead place her in an “unsafe or risky” situation.

the skewed sense of epistemic entitlement that structured the exchange left her host’s face “ashen” when he finally registered his error. She was in danger of humiliating him.

mansplaining is systemic; it is part of a (much) broader system. Solnit aptly describes this system as a male “archipelago of arrogance”—and, I would add, entitlement.

If the truth is not our property, then neither is authority. Listening to women becomes superfluous, except for instrumental reasons—a mere performance, intended to mollify or, perhaps, to virtue-signal.

Black women are not just dismissed, then; they are not heeded in the first place by many of those overly endowed with epistemic privilege.

One of the darkest manifestations of epistemic entitlement in this vein is gaslighting.

Take Kyle Stephens, one of the many girls the Michigan State University gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar victimized. She was forced to apologize to him for impugning his good name by reporting his abuses to her parents. Who forced her to apologize? Her parents. Her parents.

like many victims of such gaslighting, Stephens subsequently came to doubt her own memory.

Gaslighting thus results in a victim who feels a false sense of obligation to believe his story over her own.

When successful, gaslighting robs the victim of the ability to name the harm done to her—and, equally, who did it.

studies have shown that, when it comes to climate change, conservative white men feel particularly entitled to their opinion, however incorrect, to the effect that what is happening is not happening.34 (Such denial of basic realities is in some respects the attempted gaslighting of the planet.)

There is a certain kind of man who is unable or unwilling to cope with others expressing views that threaten his own sense of what has happened, or ought to happen.

when it comes to the question of who is deemed entitled to hold power, women are subject to marked disadvantages under many (though not all) circumstances.

regardless of their own gender, people tend to assume that men in historically male-dominated positions of power are more competent than women, unless this assumption is explicitly contradicted by further information.

a substantial number of voters defected to a candidate from another party to avoid voting for a woman from their own—for

social psychologists have speculated that there’s something about women who seek the highest positions of power and the most masculine-coded authority positions that people continue to find off-putting.

it doesn’t take much to be perceived as power-seeking: It may be enough simply to run for the presidency.

researchers hypothesized that such problems stem from a perception that a woman who succeeds in such a position must be lacking in “communality”: the quality of being nurturing and pro-social, a deficit for which women tend to be harshly punished.

there are widespread prescriptions that “specify that women should behave communally, exhibiting nurturing and socially sensitive attributes that demonstrate concern for others, such as being kind, sympathetic, and understanding.”

The researchers also noted that women don’t have to actively demonstrate uncaring attributes in order to be perceived as uncommunal, and punished accordingly.

Perceived communality made an enormous difference for female but not male applicants. When it comes to demonstrable niceness, it’s an imperative for powerful women—and seemingly inconsequential for their male rivals.

Being perceived as communal in presidential races turns out to be an uphill battle for many female candidates.

while concerns about Klobuchar’s being positively abusive toward staffers certainly deserved to be taken seriously, there’s no doubt that the story also raised the hackles of people who simply couldn’t abide a female boss who displayed moments of anger, however understandable or human.

Joe Biden’s outward appearance of geniality and good humor belie a fierce temper behind the scenes,

Bernie Sanders has also been described as “unbelievably abusive” by a former subordinate.

Beto O’Rourke, behaved like an “asshole” to staffers too, by his own admission.

Compared with the reports about Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff, such stories about Biden, Sanders, and O’Rourke have attracted little interest, and even less consternation.

Gillibrand’s supposed non-communal sin was quite different from Klobuchar’s, but it attracted at least as much outrage. Gillibrand was widely perceived to have “thrown Al Franken under the bus,”

For some people, there are few worse sins for a female leader than thwarting the power to which a man is tacitly deemed entitled, even if there are multiple credible reports of his being sexually inappropriate, lecherous, or handsy.

Communal behavior seems to count in a woman’s favor only if it can be attributed to stable traits of character, or her own authentic nature.

The more the Left loves them (partly on the grounds of their extraordinary communality in fighting for future generations), the more the Right resents it—especially in view of their sense that this girl or woman is actually hurting people’s (read: their own) interests and impugning their good character.

A potent double bind presents itself to women in this position: embrace the hope that you’re exceptionally communal and risk flaming out, when people are inevitably disappointed by some aspect of your history, views, or platform. Don’t present yourself as exceptionally communal, and run a greater risk that your campaign will never go anywhere, like Klobuchar and Gillibrand.

The fact that it was a perceived failure vis-à-vis care that cost her so dearly does not seem likely to have been accidental.

Nor did Biden face much criticism for his hazy public-option health plan, or for the embellished stories he told on the campaign trail—not to mention, his history of plagiarism.

All of this reflects the widespread—and, yes—misogynistic sense that, unlike their male rivals, women are not entitled to make mistakes, especially when it comes to supposed communal values. They are not entitled to accept money. They are not entitled to challenge the narrative put forward by their male counterparts. And while they may be entitled to have power under certain conditions, they are not entitled to actively seek it, nor to take it away from the men they’re up against. Until we face these facts, we will not have a female president.

Perhaps most perniciously of all, the electability narrative framed voting for a woman in the 2020 Democratic primary as a selfish choice—as a political liability, given the existential threat of Trump being returned to the White House.

I think I made an intellectual mistake the first time around: I confused the intransigence of some people with the unwillingness of most people to think soberly and deeply about the problems facing girls and women.

Learning what one is entitled to is—or at least should be—inextricably connected with learning what one owes to others.

Studies show that the school-aged daughters of fathers tend to be more ambitious when he does his fair share of housework—saying they want to be a lawyer or a doctor, for example, rather than that they want to follow a specifically feminine-coded path, as a teacher, a nurse, or staying at home with children.